Word: ziggurats
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Years ago, a young Bostonian’s quest for status began the moment he enrolled at Harvard. He needed to enter the right final club, the right country club, the right Boston club, the boards of the right charities and finally, if he reached the ziggurat of Boston society, Harvard’s almighty Board of Overseers. His children would, in their turn, need to go to the right boarding schools, join the right societies and know whether or not the right wines were being served at the right time...
From these studies, Damasio, who is chairman of the University of Iowa's neurology department, concludes that consciousness is a layered edifice, like some Mayan pyramid or Mesopotamian ziggurat. It is based on an inchoate feeling of self that arises from the brain's detailed "diagram" of the body. Damasio says this diagram, which is continuously revised by the senses, can be thought of as the "protoself"; it props up the rest of the structure...
...frog or battery-powered bunny again? To program your own all-Luke Perry channel? To add impromptu bathroom breaks to live broadcasts? Replay Networks and TiVo, creators of new digital-TV recording devices, are popping the question, working to persuade you to add yet another cube to the towering ziggurat of entertainment--cable box, VCR, DVD and video-game player--on your TV table. They say their new gadgets could just change TV itself in the process, a possibility that has the networks more than a little nervous. Lawyers have been summoned...
...Mesopotamia the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates, the Chalcolithic people were building the first large city-states -- Uruk, Ur and Eridu Larsa -- in what is now southern Iraq. All grew to be thriving and fiercely competitive commercial centers. City life was centered around a ziggurat, or temple, that served as both a place of worship and a storehouse for surplus food. For the first time people were divided into several distinct social classes according to status and occupation...
Nimrud's glory ended abruptly in 612 B.C., when the Assyrians, badly overextended, were taken by surprise by the combined armies of the Medes, the Babylonians and the Scythians. Nimrud was overrun. The palace caught fire, and its ceilings collapsed. Over time, the Tigris changed course, and the glorious ziggurat was reduced to a formless mound...